Thursday letters: Fastening their seatbelts ...

Copyright 2014: Houston Chronicle

Updated 7:29 pm, Wednesday, March 12, 2014

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Thursday letters: Fastening their seatbelts ...

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Just moving cars

Regarding "Looking for signs of détente between autos, bikes" (Page B1, Tuesday), without a long-term focused plan for streets and transportation, the city of Houston faces the grim prospect of massive traffic congestion and infrastructure breakdown. Some would even go as far to call this impending scenario "Carmageddon."

Following Mayor Parker's Complete Streets Executive Order last October, we are still anxiously waiting to see what changes this new policy will bring to Houston's streets.

The current street design standards for the city of Houston are focused around one goal - moving cars. Here's to hoping that Mayor Parker's new Complete Streets policy will answer calls for safer travel for all users of Houston's streets, including pedestrians, motorists, cyclists and transit riders.

As we begin to transform the city's streets to better accommodate all Houstonians, let's look at best practice street design standards being used in major cities across the country, including Denver, Charlotte and Chicago. Let's all get to work to help Houston become a city of great streets.

If the mayor continues to ignore the streets, the potholes will close the streets for her.

If you see water collecting on any street, a pothole will soon follow, as the favorite city ploy is for employees to throw some gravel on the water and let the street(s) continue to erode from below the street surface.

In spite of all the political spin that is leading to nowhere, the state of disrepair of the Houston roadway system is becoming critical.

Not only are the number of potholes increasing but just as critical is the horrendous quality of the so-called repairs, which seem to have been made by dumping asphalt without any thought to make the repair level with the street.

I would suggest to anyone that driving west on Richmond, West Alabama, Sunset Boulevard and many other Houston streets has become an extreme sports adventure.